It took 20 years to find the right way – and the right designer – to refurb this architecturally important house in Montecito
DINING ROOM
The plan was not to compete with the home’s Spanish Revival architecture but instead to ‘respect it and bring it to life by playing off its colours and patterns’, says the interior designer Tamara Kaye-Honey.
Living in ahistorically significant house comes with many advantages. For the British-A merican couple Justine Roddick and Tina Schlieske, who live in one of the finest examples of Spanish Revival architecture in Santa Barbara (as designed by the late, great A merican architect George Washington Smith), that includes original handmade tilework, hand-painted ceilings by George’s female apprentice, the pioneering architect Lutah Maria Riggs, and murals by the Mexican artist Alfredo Ramos Martínez. Also, says Justine: ‘[George] must have chosen the most perfect location because it’s just a 10-minute walk to the beach and aquick hop to the mountains.’ The house even featured in American Vogue in 1927.
But it also came with asizable challenge: how to update it and, says Justine, ‘add our f lavour while keeping the fabric of the home real’. Indeed, the couple had lived in the house for nearly 20 years before finally taking the plunge to renovate. Having followed the interior designer Tamara Kaye-Honey ’s work for years, they thought, ‘If anybody can do this, it’s her.’
The plan they came up with, says Tamara, was not to ‘compete’ with the house’s original architecture, but to ‘respect it and bring it to life by playing off its colours and patterns’. They deliberately started slowly, firstly with the dining room, adding House of Hackney curtains, malachite-green paint and a pendant light that perfectly offset its dramatic hand-painted ceiling and f loor tiles. ‘And then we were like – okay, this is going to be so much fun – and a breeze,’ says Justine. ‘So it just continued organically.’
Tamara brought in the couple’s personalit y by identif ying their taste –and then elevating it. For example, in the living room where they already had one barrel chair, Tamara sourced awhole suite of them and had them covered in matching emerald fabric. Similarly, Tamara found more mid-century dining chairs to complement the couple’s existing ones and had them upholstered in colours that picked up the original artwork and the new decorative scheme. ‘She incorporated a lot of what we had already but just upped the game of it all,’ says Justine. And Tamara paid tribute to Justine’s
